WordPress was so surprised I tried to access my blog this morning it decided I was suspicious. I don’t blame them to be fair. Anyway after being locked out for half an hour and several poor attempts to reset my password I’m finally in so I’ll try and make it worthwhile.

It’s difficult to know where to start after such a big gap so I’ll catch you up another time and focus today on the thing that is the current bane of my life – being 48/peri/menopausal. Because everyone is allowed a moan every now and again…

It’s hard to articulate how frigging frustrating going through this is. It’s like living life at about a third the usual speed and enthusiasm. Lots of women say they feel they’ve lost themselves somewhere along the line and that sums a lot of it up for me. And it’s not just the long ago me who was a size 10 and had an enthusiasm for everything from silversmithing to yoga – but the post lockdown me who used to alternate a hiit workout with a pensive journalling half hour every morning, after stepping out of bed with a slight spring in my step. Nowadays I drag myself downstairs, make a cup of tea (with added collagen for my joints obviously) and sip it slowly while doomscrolling/watching carpets being cleaned for 30 minutes. Not what I would have pictured myself doing when I was 25.

Of course my energy levels are on the floor (and that’s with HRT patches – without was horrendous) – but even they are starting to lose their shine. When I first went on HRT I did 100 days of exercise – now I find it’s best not to count days at all and certainly don’t identify if I’ve moved on any of them. Anyway my watch regularly tells me off and it doesn’t make a difference.

I’m so tired. I bore myself even mentioning it and yet still feel the need to do so about every twenty minutes. The good news is I have a burst of energy between about 10am and 2pm. Of course by the time I finish work I’ve lost both the energy and enthusiasm so go back to watching old episodes of Who Do You Think You Are on TV and eating crisps.

The sleep is, in honesty, terrible. I go to bed early, drop off like I’ve run a marathon the day before, wake up several times through being too hot (or for no reason whatsoever) and have very little deep or REM sleep so it’s no surprise I can’t remember anything. The worst bit of it is that most nights I get at least 7.5 hours sleep and my watch actually celebrates while I’m wandering around the kitchen in a daze wondering what day it is.

In fairness the HRT does seem to have made a difference to my brain and my emotions – at one point I was crying in meetings and forgetting words like discrimination and equality (I work in HR so it wasn’t ideal). At least now that bit is less embarrassing, although I still often have to explain why I’m fanning myself with a notebook.

Oh and there’s that – I’m red ALL THE TIME. Apparently my body has forgotten that you aren’t supposed to wear red when you are ginger and I’m constantly clashing with my own hair. I now wear green makeup to offset the colour but I’ve never seen what I look like in a mid meeting hot flush – maybe it’s more of a Hulk like moment than I imagine.

And finally there’s the classic timing that just as I’ve lost myself in the menopausal wilderness my beautiful talented eldest daughter will be going away to uni and half my actual purpose in the world will head down the A1/up the M1 with her. But that’s a moan for another day.

So anyway I’m still on HRT, and I’m still doing an awful lot of reading in the hopes I’ll discover something I should be doing that actually interests me (rather than diet and exercise). I bought a cook book but it told me to eat tofu for breakfast, lunch and dinner so I sent it to the charity shop and went back to delicious carbohydrates.

I’d like to tell you that today since the sun is shining, and I clearly have enough energy to write a blog article, I’m going to positively tackle my menopausal issues and embrace my “second spring” (frankly what the actual hell?), but I’m not. Instead I’m going to use the sweet spot between 10 and 2 to clean the bathroom and do a spot of light weeding. Then there’s a Daniel Ratcliffe episode of Who Do You Think You Are that I missed the first time round…